Lorenzo Wang, designer of Page 44 Studio’s trick-dirt-biking game Freakstyle, has been thinking about happiness. More specifically, he’s been thinking about the recent work of people like Daniel Gilbert and Jennifer Michael Hecht and their new insights into just how human happiness works. In his new essay, The Pursuit of Games: Designing Happiness, Wang applies these new theories of happiness to making good games and the result is a set of design maxims that every developer should take to heart. To clarify, happiness does not denote fun. As Wang puts it, “Happiness comes from the resolution of anger, ennui, fear, frustration, insecurities, and unimportance. Pleasure is an immediate, short-term rush, often visceral, and designers usually to call it ‘fun.’ You can have one without the other.”
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